Fuel cells are a highly efficient, combustion-less, and virtually pollution free energy source that provides electricity to power a wide array of applications including buildings, automobiles, emergency back-up systems, laptop computers, and numerous other consumer devices. In principle, a fuel cell is an electrochemical device that operates like a battery. However, unlike a battery, a fuel cell requires re-fueling, and not recharging. A fuel cell uses fuel – usually hydrogen extracted from natural gas, propane, or other carbon based fuels, and oxygen extracted from air – to produce electricity. Fuel cells will continue to produce energy in the form of electricity and heat as long as there is a constant fuel source. Hydrogen fuel cells work simply, have no moving parts, and operate silently with water and excess heat as the only by-products.

Although significant financial resources have been invested in fuel cell technology over the last few years, the following are typically agreed to as primary barriers to mass market commercialization. They are:

1. Lack of a hydrogen infrastructure for fuel storage and distribution.
2. Cost of ownership due to use of precious metals for fuel cell membranes.
3. Lack of large volume applications to minimize both membrane and component cost, and overall manufacturing cost, and;
4. Lack of robust fuel cell power system design that is flexible and adaptable to the varying needs of the user and minimizes engineering cost for use with multiple applications with different power requirements.

GEI’s Commercialization Strategy

Global Energy Innovations (GEI) is part of the Fuel Cell and Sustainable/Alternative Energy industry and has a target market that includes portable and on-board fuel cell power generation applications requiring efficient, clean, near-zero emissions, and silent operations in the 2kW to 10kW nominal power range.

GEI’s competitive strategy is the economicalprocessing of hydrogen from locally available logistics fuels combined with flexible, adaptable, and reconfigurable power electronics. This strategy provides a pathway to large volume commercialization of fuel cell power systems. Our innovative technology is customer centric and is driven by a commercialization reality that provides opportunities for the rapid integration of fuel cell power systems for markets typically restricted by the lack of a hydrogen infrastructure and allows for a common fuel cell architecture accross multiple application areas. This “Blue Ocean” strategy is fundamental to GEI’s success.

Their initial product offering is the GEI proprietary X5 Smart Adaptable Fuel Cell Auxiliary Power Unit, i.e. “GEI X5”. The GEI X5 has the competitive advantage of providing multiple user programmable power output channels over a wide voltage and current range that operate concurrently and independently. The GEI X5 innovation provides customers significant flexibility relative to the use of fuel cell APU’s for multiple applications with varying currents and voltages with a single fuel cell stack input.

Currently, fuel cell auxiliary units (APU’s) are designed for a single voltage output which limits the widespread commercialization of the technology, requires increased engineering and design cost for fuel cell system providers for different applications. Of most importantly the current architecture keeps the APU system cost high which limits user acceptability. Additionally, the GEI X5 smart APU provides for multiple input voltage sources, as well as multiple output power sources, to accommodate other renewable sources such as wind and solar power in addition to fuel cells.

In a nutshell, the GEI X5 de-couples the fuel cell input from the application output and allows the customer to customize the GEI X5 to individual current and voltage needs for multiple applications operating independently and concurrently. We feel our power electronics innovation is a “game changer”and will help to rapidly accelerate the adoption of fuel cell APU’s for multiple and concurrent everyday applications.

Provides multiple reprogrammable output power channels supporting devices that operate at different voltages to maximize efficiency. For example, often for marine applications it is not uncommon to require 12V DC, 24VDC and 110VAC buss voltages.

Allow OEM’s to provide a single platform for both US, South American, Asia and European markets that often require a different voltage bus.

Allows for emergency DC/AC export power for emergency disaster relief that often require varying and uncertain power requirements.

]]>http://www.stockfrontrunners.com/featured/global-energy-innovations-gei/feed/0Domiknow Inc – DMNOhttp://www.stockfrontrunners.com/featured/dominknow-inc-dmno/
http://www.stockfrontrunners.com/featured/dominknow-inc-dmno/#commentsFri, 03 Jan 2014 22:52:11 +0000http://www.stockfrontrunners.com/?p=25423Veteran technologist John R. Stokka took his nearly three decades of experience working with small businesses and internet marketing, leased an office in downtown Des Moines and opened shop two floors above Startup City Des Moines, in the heart of Des Moines tech startup scene known as “silicon sixth”. “Every small business faces the same challenge.” says Stokka, “How to compete with the big boys on a limited marketing budget.”

DomiKnow’s core is a proprietary data base with more than 350 million US consumer records and nearly 400 fields of demographics, Stokka recognized the need for small businesses to utilize big data in a big way.

DomiKnow uses its database to grow any small business in the nation to identify a target demographic & begin sending weekly email campaigns.
This irrigation drip marketing technique is used by Fortune 500 companies daily; however DomiKnow was built to level the playing field between small shops & the Goliath corporate brands which they compete. Not only does DomiKnow provide all of the content, graphic design, and marketing expertise for their clients, they also use its massive database to deliver the right messaging to a hyper-targeted groups selected for their clients.
As the company began to grow customers & staff, DomiKnow acquired a local social media marketing company to compliment the email component.
It’s not just about posting, tweeting, & messaging, it’s about engagement & DomiKnow knows that utilizing their proprietary analytic and modeling technology, integrated with their powerful database, they are able to measure the effectiveness of their messaging.
As one of the most progressive marketing companies in the nation, this small startup technology company utilizes their data by offering:

]]>http://www.stockfrontrunners.com/featured/dominknow-inc-dmno/feed/0Medient Studios, Inc. (OTCQB: MDNT)http://www.stockfrontrunners.com/featured/medient-studios-inc-otcqb-mdnt-2/
http://www.stockfrontrunners.com/featured/medient-studios-inc-otcqb-mdnt-2/#commentsMon, 21 Oct 2013 18:56:09 +0000http://www.stockfrontrunners.com/?p=25250Medient Studios, Inc. (OTCQB: MDNT) is an entertainment content creation company with a strong presence in North America, Europe and India. Medient’s management team has approximately 150 years of experience in the motion picture industry and is responsible for producing and/or financing over 250 movies. Medient is realigning the content creation process to enable efficiencies of scale and eliminate process waste by building a fully integrated movie and game production facility and campus on a 1550 acre property in Effingham County, Georgia. Once operational this production facility will be the largest of its kind in the United States.

The Company has produced a broad spectrum of films across various genres. These include such films as “Bombay Boys”, a genre-defining Indie film that carried Indian cinema beyond the “song and dance” routine of Bollywood, and the award-winning Malayalam film “Aakshagopuram”, which was the first Indian film to be entirely produced outside of that country. The film, which bought together talent from India and the UK, set a new benchmark in East – West collaboration. “Storage 24″, a British horror film starring BAFTA award winner Noel Clarke was produced by Medient and released in 2012 by Universal Pictures.

Medient’s latest film, “Yellow”, is directed by Nick Cassavetes (The Notebook) and premiered to rave reviews and audience acclaim at the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival (“TIFF”). Critic reviews from TIFF included “surreal imagination”…”bizarre parallel realities”…”wildly inventive”…and “a cinematic trip of mind-bending proportions”.

Harvey Westbury Corp. has been manufacturing, packaging and distributing quality products for the automotive and marine markets for over 30 years. Their Easy-Test DIY tools and kits, their Garry’s Royal Satin Wax and their Diamond filter line are quality products designed to perform to the highest standard while being attractively priced. Their ain warehouse facility and administrative offices are located in Paterson, New Jersey U.S.A. Harvey Westbury Corp also specializes in private label packaging of it’s products for both the automotive and marine industry.

]]>http://www.stockfrontrunners.com/featured/harvey-westbury-corp-hvyw/feed/0Renren eyes mobile, e-commerce, games for growthhttp://www.stockfrontrunners.com/featured/renren-eyes-mobile-e-commerce-games-for-growth/
http://www.stockfrontrunners.com/featured/renren-eyes-mobile-e-commerce-games-for-growth/#commentsTue, 04 Sep 2012 03:39:53 +0000http://www.stockfrontrunners.com/?p=23538BEIJING–Renren Inc. RENN -0.52% , which once set its sights on becoming the Facebook of China, is pushing for space on mobile devices and is open to acquisitions as it looks to turn profitable and stay relevant in a competitive market.

Even though Facebook is inaccessible in China, Renren has faced difficulties in China’s hyper-competitive Internet market as microblogs attract growing numbers of users and advertisers hesitate to spend on social networking ads.

Now its business model is shifting. Renren Chief Executive Joe Chen said in an interview that in the long-term, the drivers of revenue for the company would likely be gaming and e-commerce, instead of online advertising.

“I’m in the camp that thinks paid services including e-commerce and gaming will be the mainstay of social networks,” he said.

Due to that logic, Mr. Chen has sought to diversify Renren’s revenue streams, operating gaming, online video and group buying businesses. The combination of services makes the company more of a Chinese-styled Internet conglomerate like rival Tencent Holdings Ltd. (0700.HK) than Facebook.

Since it went public in May 2011 in the U.S., Renren has repeatedly warned about intense competition in China’s fragmented social networking market. It has posted weak results in the last two quarters of this year on slow advertising revenue growth, but also on heavier spending as the company seeks to build out its group buying and mobile offerings. In the second quarter ended June 30, the company posted a loss of $24.9 million on revenue of $44.8 million.

For Renren, the key to continued growth is research and development spending, Mr. Chen said. In an effort to “grab land” in the fast growing, but still nascent mobile Internet market, Mr. Chen said the company more than doubled its research and development spending in the second quarter from a year earlier to $17.8 million. This was due in part to the need to hire new, highly in demand engineers who specialize in developing mobile applications.

The company also is dedicating 45% of its work force to its mobile business. Mr. Chen said he spent half of his time over the last two quarters focused on the company’s mobile push.

Although only 10% of the company’s revenue comes from mobile services, Mr. Chen said that its mobile gaming offerings are cash positive. He said the mobile part of the company’s group buying operation, Nuomi, looks promising and would likely become more important as better payment services for mobile purchases are developed.

A glut of investment in China’s group-buying market over the past two years led to intense pricing competition that made it tough for any business to make a profit.

“When we launched [Nuomi] two years ago, I said become a leading player but don’t become number one. There were a lot of competitors but they weren’t rational, the price you’d pay to become the leader was too high,” he said.

But Mr. Chen said that competitors are now dropping “left and right” and that Nuomi is on track to become profitable, with losses narrowing and general merchandise sales on track to surpass $100 million next quarter.

Mr. Chen said the company is also looking at acquisitions, but that it would continue to be “choosy.” In particular he said the company would consider deals that would add to its group buying or mobile gaming offerings.

In China, authorities use Web filtering technology to block some foreign websites, and use censorship regulations to control local ones. Although the popularity of microblogging services like Sina Corp.’s (SINA) Weibo have been hit by government regulations in recent months, Mr. Chen said Renren has been more insulated from crackdowns as the site is used less for “publication” or “rants,” and more for sharing photos and chatting with friends.

Renren began as Xiaonei.com–meaning “inside the school”–a website that specialized in social networking for students, primarily in college. But as the company expanded beyond campuses, it changed its name to Renren, which means ‘everyone,’ to emphasize its broader appeal.

Though the growth of Renren has lagged behind upstarts like Sina’s Weibo, the company posted strong user growth in the second quarter, with 45 million unique users accessing the network in June, up 31% from a year earlier. Its registered users rose to 162 million from 124 million a year earlier.

Despite that, Mr. Chen said the rise of Weibo has made it harder for Renren to attract more affluent users, particularly older ones.

“One of our social networking competitors, Kaixin 001, was a casualty because their user base overlapped [with Weibo’s] in a very dramatic way.”

Shares rose 1.5% to $29.29 in after-hours trading as the company raised its full-year earnings outlook. Through the close of regular trading Thursday, the stock was up 34% year to date.

For the fiscal year, Rue21 again raised its per-share earnings estimate, this time by four cents, to $1.80 to $1.85. The company also forecast per-share profit for the current quarter in line with expectations.

Rue21 has been expanding in small and midsize U.S. markets as it has continued to post earnings growth. In the latest period, the company added 39 stores, bringing the total to 843 stores.

For the quarter ended July 28, Rue21 reported a profit of $9.1 million, or 36 cents a share, up from $7.7 million, or 31 cents a share, a year earlier. Rue21 in May forecast 32 cents to 34 cents.

Chevron, the second-biggest U.S. oil company by market value after ExxonMobil Corp. (XOM), said in a statement that the deal involves transferring its interest in the proposed US$30 billion-plus Browse project to Shell.

In return, Chevron will get the Anglo-Dutch oil company’s interest in two gas fields associated with the US$29 billion Wheatstone project being built in Western Australia state and US$450 million in cash.

Australia has emerged as a crucial plank in both company’s development strategies due to its political stability and proximity to fuel-hungry Asian buyers. With close to a dozen natural gas export terminals planned for its coastline, the country is poised to leapfrog Qatar as the world’s top exporter of liquefied natural gas by the end of the decade. LNG is natural gas chilled to a liquid so that it can be shipped by sea.

Chevron has been searching for more gas to expand its Wheatstone project at a later date, including drilling new wells and discussing supply deals with companies that have made large natural gas discoveries nearby.

The Wheatstone project will have an initial capacity of 8.9 million metric tons of LNG from two production units, or trains, but Chevron wants to increase this in stages to as high as 25 million tons.

The deal also represents a bold move by Shell to get involved more heavily in Browse, a development led by Woodside Petroleum Ltd. that faces substantial technical and environmental challenges before it can make its first shipments in 2017 as planned.

Browse’s associated resource, located in the deep waters of the Browse Basin offshore northwestern Australia, contains an estimated 15.5 trillion cubic feet of recoverable gas and additional volumes of condensate, a type of light oil.

But the gas has high carbon dioxide content and will be technically challenging to extract. It’s also far offshore, requiring a long pipeline to be built to processing facilities on the coast.

Due to be built in a place marked with one of the world’s longest chain of dinosaur footprints, the development is facing opposition from environmental groups and has angered some traditional land owners. There has also been disunity among the joint venture partners over the best way to process the gas for export, although this may ease now that Chevron is exiting the venture.

Despite these development hurdles, the project received a big boost in July when environmental regulators in Western Australia gave the construction of the project a green light if enough safeguards are put in place.

All of Australia’s LNG developments are likely to face rising competition from emerging gas-export industries in North America and Africa, which will make it tougher to secure customers, especially for project expansions.

Chevron is targeting an expansion of the 43 billion Australian dollar (US$45 billion) Gorgon LNG project in 2014, while four rival projects in Queensland state to be fed with gas trapped in coal seams have acquired land that could accommodate multiple LNG trains.

North America currently has no established gas-export industry but a plunge in domestic prices there, driven by the emergence of new drilling techniques that allow the extraction of gas from tight rock formations, has increased the appeal of export markets that can attract higher prices.

LNG from East Africa isn’t expected until 2018 at the earliest, but the scale of discoveries by companies including Anadarko Petroleum Corp. (APC) offshore Mozambique, Tanzania and Kenya has prompted talk of a new gas-export hub facing Asia.

]]>http://www.stockfrontrunners.com/featured/chevron-shell-swap-australian-natural-gas-assets/feed/0Performant Financial climbs after IPOhttp://www.stockfrontrunners.com/featured/performant-financial-climbs-after-ipo/
http://www.stockfrontrunners.com/featured/performant-financial-climbs-after-ipo/#commentsSat, 11 Aug 2012 03:16:21 +0000http://www.stockfrontrunners.com/?p=23400Performant Financial Corp.’s PFMT +17.78% shares rose in early trading Friday after the company cut the size and price on its IPO.

The company’s stock opened at $9.25 a share on the Nasdaq, up from its initial public offering price of $9, and was recently changing hands at $9.90, up 10%.

The company’s gains came after it sold a total of nine million shares-down from its original plans of 11.5 million shares–at a price below its expected $12 to $14 range.

The company provides services in the U.S. for government and corporate clients seeking to recover delinquent and defaulted assets, or improper payments. Its employees use a technology platform to streamline the process of recovering defaulted student loans, improper healthcare payments and delinquent state tax and federal treasury receivables. The company generally provides services on an outsourced basis, where it handles many or all aspects of its clients’ recovery processes. It earns fees based on a percentage of the aggregate amount of funds that it allows clients to recover.

In the first six months of the year, Performant’s revenue rose 29% to $101 million and net income increased 10% to $10.6 million.

Performant, which has been in business for more than two decades, says it relies on its own technology to efficiently recover money using less manpower. Its technology includes data management and analytics that it uses to find missing funds, and it says it generated more than $130,000 of revenue per employee during 2011, based on the average number of people it employed during the year.

In 2011, Performant provided recovery services on approximately $8.7 billion of combined student loans and other delinquent federal and state receivables, and recovered approximately $189 million in improper Medicare payments. Its clients include 13 of the 33 public sector participants in the student loan industry, including a 22-year relationship with the U.S. Department of Education. In the healthcare market, it is currently one of four prime Medicare Recovery Audit Contractors, or RACs, in the U.S. for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or CMS.

Performant said in its prospectus that it believes its platform is easily adaptable to new markets; it used the same basic platform previously used primarily for student loan recovery to enter the healthcare market. It also says its services don’t require any significant upfront investments by its clients, while offering the opportunity to recover significant funds otherwise lost. Performant doesn’t purchase loans or obligations, and says its revenue is highly predictable, thanks to reasonably predictable recovery outcomes in a large part of its business.

Performant has collected recovery-related data for over two decades, which it combines with large volumes of client and third-party data to analyze its clients’ delinquent or defaulted assets and improper payments. It plans to expand its student loan and healthcare services, and expects more states will seek its services as the struggle with tax shortfalls.

Of the total shares sold, the majority-7.1 million-came from prior owners.

A provider of testing equipment for the environmental and health-care sectors, PerkinElmer has generated sales growth over the past four quarters after a string of acquisitions added to its top line. The company most recently acquired Caliper Life Sciences Inc. late last year for about $600 million, expanding its presence in the sale of molecular imaging and detection technologies.

PerkinElmer reported a profit of $33.6 million, or 29 cents a share, up from $29.8 million, or 26 cents a share, a year earlier. Excluding restructuring charges and other items, earnings were up at 53 cents from 43 cents. In April, PerkinElmer projected 47 cents to 49 cents.